The 19th of December 2010 saw presidential elections in Belarus, and with them came three very predictable things. The incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, won; the West declared the election fraudulent; and the Belarusian opposition staged a protest leading to arrests.

Western bourgeois media and governments would have us believe that these three outcomes were all the result of a non-democratic electoral process, involving election-rigging by ‘Europe’s last dictator’. The reality, as is so often the case, is very different.